The Sith Lords: I Dreamt of Malachor
by Veriform
Summary: "It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it." What does the Exile want? Why does she extend her hands in charity one moment and deal out death the next? Her mind is a cipher, her actions inscrutable. This is the first volume in the story of those who traveled with her on the long and winding road to Malachor, the beginning and the end.
1. The Little Death

I Dreamt of Malachor

_There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you._

Chapter One: The Little Death

When she came through the door, he was counting cards.

_Switch the face of the +1/-1 card, the totals are nine-ten. Switch the face of the +2/-2 card, the total is eight-eleven, switch..._

The blur of the energy cage smeared her outline as she stepped into the detention center, but he could see that her long legs and muscular arms were bare, that she was naked except for a sweat-soaked singlet. He kept counting cards and let the fast-talking Atton, the cheap one, the one nobody could ever take seriously, step forward. He grinned like nothing and nobody. "Are you an angel?"

_...the totals are five-seven, switch..._

She paused in front of the control panel, one slim hand resting lightly on the shutoff primer. "I need a way off this rock," she said. Her voice was tired but warm, like she had finished laughing hours ago at a joke she was still mulling over. "Can you help me with that, or should I leave you in there? It looks safe, at least."

"Sorry, sorry," he stood stiffly, stretching as much as the cage's crackling barrier allowed. "It's been a while, you know?"

He thought he saw the ghost of a smile through the blur.

"So, can you help me or not?"

"I know the station's systems pretty well," he said. _Double the eight, pure Pazaak, shuffle and deal, switch the face of the +1/-2 card... _"And if there's anything left on this rock that has legs, besides you, I mean, I can fly it."

She shoved the primer back. The force field died with a falling hum and Atton stepped out, his ears still ringing with days of accumulated white noise. He was tired, thirsty, starving; his head ached with the weight of so much time whiled away on nonsense lists and parlor tricks. He saw her, lean and strong, small breasts, the swell of her hips, and his mind slipped a gear. Just for a moment.

She reacted, a frown creasing her smooth brow.

He slipped as naturally as breathing back behind his walls. "Guess I should've started with my name," he joked, smiling, desperate drive to hide tucked neatly, completely away. "Atton Rand." He held out his hand.

She hesitated before answering, but then the look of worry smoothed away. She returned his smile, brushing her dark hair back behind her ear.

"Meetra Surik."

He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. Malachor had taught them, and she knew it. He chose to say nothing. She watched him, eyes intent

For the first time, absent the force cage's interference, he heard the low throb of the station's alarms. He'd known something was wrong when no one came to feed him, but knowing and _knowing _were two different things. "Where is everyone?"

"The station droids are running wild and all the comlinks are dead," she said. "Come on, we're going to the observation deck. Let's see if you can pull your weight and get us out of here."

"At least the view-"

"You're leading the charge, Atton." She stepped aside with a thin, humorless smile and gestured him through the door and out into the mining station's central atrium.

He passed her with a rueful look, limbs still stiff from so long spent cramped inside his cell, smelling he knew of sweat and worse. The filtered air seemed fresh to him. Mining droids lay broken, sparking, here and there. "Looks like you can take care of yourself," he said. _The shape of her ass, the cleft, like a peach, sweat on her neck... _"You weren't kidding about the droids running wild."

"I don't kid often," she said.

They reached the bank of computer terminals overlooking the mining station's external scaffolds and its docking umbilical. The void waited beyond them, and the roiling asteroid field backlit by the golden ruin of the Peragus II nebula. Atton remembered being impressed by the view when he'd first set foot on Peragus, but three years working the station had stolen that. Now it was just space.

"Alright," he said, not waiting for her go-ahead to slide into the operator's seat and log into the station's system. He raised his hands in a dramatic flourish as she came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder. "Observe." His fingers flew over the keys. He ran diagnostics, checked log files, and started a systematic ping of the station's comlink systems.

"This doesn't look good," she said after a minute.

"It isn't," he replied. "Breached vents in the underlevel, comm silence across the board, and half the system commands are cut off. Looks like someone took a vibroblade to the computing tower."

"What about that?" She pointed to a blinking indicator next to one of the comm sweep reports.

"Just white noise." He brought it up on the speakers. A mechanical grumble underlain by a tinny whistle like steam escaping a burst pipe. "Probably some mining droids trying to burn their way into the life support system and asphyxiate us. Nothing exciting."

"No." Her eyes narrowed and she leaned closer to the screen, resting a hand on his right shoulder. "That's an astromech droid. _My _astromech droid. Open the channel."

He did, dubious, but thrilled by her closeness. Her touch felt almost electric. ..._the -10 card, switch the face of the +2/-2 card, the total is three-thirteen..._

She cleared her throat. "T3? Is that you?"

A tentative chorus of beeps and whistles answered.

She smiled, a cat's self-satisfied grin. "I've got a job for you."

Ten minutes later, the turbolift doors wheezed open.

"I'm not going down there," Atton said at once. _...Czerka All-Purpose Utility Belt, catalog item B-130091, available in black, forest green, sunset blush... _"The lower levels are flooded with slag and superheated gases. We'd get cooked alive in seconds." He felt a

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "A Jedi's life is sacrifice."

The turbolift doors closed on her wry smile, her folded arms.

* * *

She was out of comm range for the best part of an hour. The droid was incommunicado, too, not that he'd have been able to understand it anyway. He sat by the terminal and drummed out on the keyboard's casing a song he'd heard years before. He remembered the Twi'Lek who'd sung it, zir breathy voice and flushed complexion, though he had forgotten the Nar Shaddaa dive ze'd sung it in.

_Ze was beautiful. I asked zir if ze wanted to come home with me, outside, in the alley, and ze kissed my cheek and told me I was ruined. Except that's not how it went, because we fucked and ze told me to play with zir lekku while the recording..._

"Ah, a musician. Lovely."

He whirled, scrambling to his feet. An old woman in a brown robe, her cowl pulled low to all but obscure her milky white eyes, stood in the entry to the security center and the medical wing. Her gnarled, veined hands were clasped in front of her and she wore an expression of supreme boredom on her weathered face. "Well, are you going to stand there like a fool?"

He reached for the blaster at his hip, a cheap low-power mining model he'd stripped off of one of the junked droids. He didn't draw it, but he thumbed the safety off. Better safe than sorry. "Who are you?" _...play the +6 card, stand, the total is seventeen, switch..._

She moved coolly past him. Her reflection grew in the cold glass of the observation window. "I hope your skill with a blaster outstrips your talent for conversation, or else our journey together will be a short one indeed."

"I'm also great at running and drinking, your majesty." He drew the blaster pistol. _...seventeen cycles per second means the optimal rotation speed is six hundred and eighty-nine CDM, nineteen cycles per second... _"I'll ask one more time. Who are you?"

"Who I am is a question of some complexity, the particulars of which I have neither the time nor the inclination to explore in sufficient detail with you. For now, let it suffice that my name is Kreia and that you and I share a mutual friend, currently endangering herself on our behalf." She pressed a thin hand to the glass, not turning. "She will need both of us to escape this place."

He holstered the blaster. "What are you staring out at there?" He didn't ask her if she was blind; anyone could tell just by watching her that she knew what she was doing, that her sight wasn't tied to things like eyes. _...the face of the +1/-1 card, the total..._

"Something is coming," the old woman said. She closed her eyes and let out a long, quiet breath. "I can feel it."

"I've got a bad feeling about...pretty much all of this," Atton said, returning to his seat and swiveling to face the old woman. "Where have you been hiding, anyway?"

"The morgue," she said without a trace of irony.

They waited in uncomfortable silence for a time. Or at least Atton felt uncomfortable; the old woman managed to seem at once incredibly disdainful of his presence and totally unaware that he was with her at all. Finally, after what felt like hours, the station console let out a soft ping. Atton brought up the alert and felt his stomach turn over. "There's a ship coming in through the asteroid field," he said. "It's a republic cruiser. Sith spit, the size of it..."

It glided out from behind a massive asteroid just as he looked up from the console screen. Long and lethal, its crest-like prow a seagoing predator's fin, its engines slung back low. _...the swoop always overheats if you forget to flush the radiators. You have to do it twice as often because of the bugs, or else... _"She's broadcasting tags, but there's no response from comm. The _Harbinger."_

"On your feet, fool," the old woman said sharply.

"Listen, why don't you-"

The doors of the administrative turbolift opened with a _ding_ and a shining silver assassin droid stepped out. "Good-humored appraisal: You will be long-dead by the time the _Harbinger _docks, so its arrival is of...limited consequence to you." Its hands, works of art in durasteel and plastic polymer, flexed to fit more perfectly around the grip and trigger of a lethal-looking blaster rifle. "I'm afraid things are getting out of hand and the time has come to pare down variables. You understand."

Atton rolled backward off of his seat as blaster fire shredded its upholstery and melted its post to slag. The old woman was solid gone, not so much as a flicker of brown cloth. Atton dragged himself up on the console's smoldering desk and took off at a dead run, squeezing off a couple of pot-shots that ricocheted off of the floor and the droid's silvery chassis. _...switch..._

"Irritated declaration: Normally," the droid began, still firing as Atton flung himself behind one of the huge basalt pillars supporting the observation deck's roof, "I would enjoy your attempt to make this a sporting contest, organics, but at present my schedule allows no time for recreation."

Atton took a deep breath. _Dive out guns blazing and you're dead. Stay here and you're dead. _Molten rock sprayed past him as the droid aimed for the column. _Hmm._

The turbolift doors to the mine shafts, behind the droid and to its left, opened, and she came through them like lightning, leaping what had to be fifteen feet as scalding air billowed up the shaft behind her, laden with superheated particles of grit and dirt. The droid spun smoothly on one foot and fired. The bolt went wild and she came down with both hands on the grip of a vibroblade and her whole weight behind the swing. The droid's chassis cracked, the blade shivering down through eight inches of circuitry and hydraulics.

Oil and smoke plumed around the Jedi as she yanked her weapon free.

_...switch the face of the +3/-1 card, pure Pazaak, stand, switch..._

The droid went to one knee, its arms limp, its photoreceptors flickering. "World-w...w...weary declaration: Oh, b-b-bother."

She took its head off in one swing and kicked its still-twitching body over. It fell with a loud, echoing clank. She stood over it; she'd found clothes somewhere, a rough miner's coverall stained with grease and sweat. Her knuckles were scraped and there was a cut across the bridge of her nose.

Atton emerged from behind the half-melted pillar. The old woman stood by the observation window as though she had never troubled herself to move. "Would you like to explain why a really polite assassin droid just tried to ice us?"

"We don't have time to get into it," the exile said, wiping blood from her mouth. "We need to board that ship. I have a plan."

* * *

The _Harbinger _was a mass grave, its dim halls littered with the dead. He tried not to look at them. He tried not to see other faces among those of the Republic soldiers lying in pools of their own blood and viscera, eyes upturned toward the few shipboard runner lights still flickering with life.

_...switch the +1/-4 card, the total is eleven-seventeen, switch..._

"For the record, I think trying to get into the docking bay via the fuel hookup is insane and we're all going to die."

"Death is certain," Kreia said. "The manner and meaning are in one's hands as is, to a lesser extent, the time."

"You're a ray of sunshine, aren't you?" he picked his way down the echoing corridor. Doors scored by blaster fire juddered in their hydraulic tracks. Beyond were crew quarters where, more often than not, soldiers lay dead in their beds. Slit throats. Punctured lungs. "Even if we _do _get through that fuel hookup, what's the guarantee we can get to your ship? Also, do I need to remind you that there's an asteroid field waiting out there to smash us into bite-sized chunks for the mynocks to chew on?"

"One problem at a time," the exile said. She took everything in, her gaze sweeping cabins and bulkheads, the carnage of the mess hall, the gutted armory where a quartermaster lay face down on the deck with a vibroblade in his back. The exile drew it out, strings of clotting blood unfurling from it, and examined the worn black hilt, the carbon blade. "Hmm," she mused.

That was when they struck.

They came out of the shadows, hungry ghosts in black and grey, faces hidden behind masks, invisibility rippling away from their bared vibroblades. Atton shot one in the chest and she kept coming, silent and quick as a vrelt, as her comrades vaulted over the long, narrow work table toward where Kreia and Meetra stood.

Atton swept his enemy's leg and shot her again, twice in the back, as she went crashing past him to the deck. The smell of charred meat was overwhelming. This time, she stopped. He realized a moment later that she'd caught him a glancing blow across his right forearm. Blood welled up from the shallow, messy cut, but he had no time for that. He threw himself over the table, sliding on its polished surface, and slammed into another assassin's back. They tumbled to the deck, fighting for control of the blaster as the assassin's vibroblade went skittering away.

Kreia's vibroblade decided the issue for them when she skewered the assassin through the throat. Blood dribbled onto Atton's face and shirt.

_...stand, shuffle, deal, play the +5 card, switch the face..._

Another of the masked killers flew back suddenly from Meetra and struck the bulkhead wall as through smashed in the chest with a battering ram. He slid to the ground, insensate. The last of the killers lay draped over the table, less one arm and most of her right leg.

"Sith assassins," Kreia opined, kneeling next to the unconscious man. "I feared as much. We must make haste, or more will be upon us soon." Calmly, she slit the assassin's throat and straightened up. "Come, we have lingered too long already."

"I may not look for fair fights, but that was pretty cold," Atton said. He didn't feel the words. He didn't feel anything, watching that pool of blood spread outward from the dead assassin. _...play the -7 card, total is eleven-eleven, switch..._

"We do not have the luxury of bringing our enemies to whatever justice the wreck of the Republic might dole out, if it could even be brought to acknowledge the truth that the Sith have returned." The old woman wiped her vibroblade clean with a rag. "Nor do we have time to suborn the loyalty of these beasts, or to take them prisoner. Would you turn our escape into a shuffling chain gang? How long do you think we would last?"

"Alright, sheesh," he brushed past her, heading out of the armory, "point taken."

Meetra remained a moment in the doorway, opening and closing her right hand. She looked pensive, and then she looked pleased. "Let's go," she said. "Lots of ship left."

They made rapid progress through the bowels of the ship. The medical bay was in ruins, its deck covered in blood and broken glass. The briefing room played host to the corpses of the captain and her officers, all decapitated and set in their chairs. Atton's skin crawled as they moved past that abattoir and on through darkened halls; he was certain someone was still watching, but if they were then they chose not to show themselves. The cramped corridors of the _Harbinger _left precious little room for maneuvering.

_...switch the face of the +4/-4 card, the total is sixteen-ten, double the +3 card, the total is nineteen-eighteen, switch..._

"Your arm," she said as they headed aft. "You're hurt."

"It isn't bad." Atton felt a bizarre desire to hide the injury, to conceal his weakness from her.

Kreia snorted. "We do not have time to remedy every scratch and bruise."

They took an access ladder to the cargo hold, dropping one by one into that silent, echoing space. The lights were dim in the long, high-ceilinged corridor. "First portside hall should get us to the fueling station," Atton said. He slid a fresh power cell into his blaster, ejecting the half-spent one in a puff of Tibanna gas and coolant.

"Wait," Kreia held out a hand. "I sense something...a presence..."

The doors at the far end of the hall slid open without a sound. Grey light poured in. A man in black stood framed within the archway, dwarfed by negative space. He was tall, his build muscular, but even from a hundred yards away Atton could see that his skin was a ruin of fissures and scars, his face ruined, one eye rendered useless as a stone by a livid, ugly scar that left his throat half-open. A cold chill rushed through Atton; to suffer wounds like those and survive at all, much less get up and walk...

"Run," said Kreia. "This fight is mine alone."

"He'll kill you," Meetra said. There was no doubt in her voice.

"He cannot kill what he cannot see, and power blinded him long ago." Her grip on the vibroblade's hilt was relaxed, her demeanor determined.

Atton knew a front when he saw one. "Come on," he said, turning to the exile. "We should move if we want to make it to this theoretical ship of yours ahead of sleeps-with-vibroblades."

The exile ignored him. "We'll wait for you as long as we can," she said.

Kreia walked away, heading toward the man in black, the empty door. "Don't be a fool."

They ran.

* * *

"I feel you, my master," Sion said. He made a fist of his empty hand, tendons creaking, fractured bones grinding against one another. It felt as all things felt. "No longer do I suffer beneath your false teachings. No longer do your whispers crawl within my skull."

She moved. He felt the ripple of her presence, a diminished thing, an insect crawling in the shadows. "To have fallen so far and learned nothing." Her voice mocked him from the margins of perception. "That is your true failing."

He spun, swinging even as his lightsaber crackled to life, and a volcanic surge of power moved through him as fire cleaved through her wrist, raised to strike. To violate _her _body, to give his pain to _her; _he roared with triumph like a beastas her hand fell shriveled, blackened to the deck, and silence fell. She staggered back with a cry, clutching the stump of her hand.

"You are weak, old woman." His ruined body sang with joy. He trembled, holding himself back, savoring the moment. She would feel every scar, every broken bone... He reached for her scorched sleeve. "Everything I have suffered I will visit upon you, again and again, until all that remains is a mewling-"

She looked up, shadows under her cowl. His lightsaber's blade was snuffed out, and then there was a great wind. Her hand shot out like a serpent and seized his arm, smoke rising where her fingers squeezed his ruined flesh.

**Sion.**

Her voice boomed in his mind. The cargo bay, the flickering lights, the scarred durasteel of the walls were all swept away. He stood in darkness, cold, alone.

**We have unfinished business, you and I.**

He began to scream, too numb to feel his knees striking the deck, and her face was above him, her words drawing blood from his skin. Stars bloomed and died around him in the vastness of the dark. He raged. He hated.

It was not enough.

* * *

_...double the +6, pure Pazaak... _Atton led the way through the fuel-stinking channel of the refueling port. He swallowed, nauseated by the smell, and let his mouth keep flapping. "So, this is turning out great. We should come back here for a picnic sometime when a Sith Lord isn't trying to murder us, probably so he can make a suit out of our skin."

She looked as though she was about to laugh, and then a strange expression passed over her face. She doubled over suddenly and let out a piercing shriek. Atton seized her shoulder. "Hey," he shouted. "Hey, stay with me."

She looked up at him, her body twisted snakelike and shaking. Her eyes were black as night, her mouth wide open, and the screaming didn't end, didn't peter out. It went on and on, ringing in Atton's ears, getting louder. Meetra scratched viciously at her right hand with her left; Atton could hardly restrain her when she reached for her vibroblade. He dragged her toward the tunnel, the weapon clattering to the grating underfoot.

_...switch the face of the..._

She fought him like a wild kath hound, thrashing and bucking, and she was strong. Her heels scuffed over the deck as they emerged from the refueling junction into the station's docking wing. Dead miners lay here and there, bodies scorched by plasma drills and mining lasers. People Atton had known, had gambled with, had complained alongside. He dragged her, this stranger, through the tangle of bodies, determination lending him strength.

It wasn't until he was hammering a faulty door release plate that he noticed the droid, a stubby astromech gliding along in their wake on its treads and somehow managing to look worried. "Hey," he said. "Where did you come from, trashcan?" Meetra went limp in his arms, her sudden dead weight almost too much for his exhausted arms.

"My hand." Her voice was a broken rasp. There was blood on her upper lip and she held her right hand clutched against her chest, its fingers locked in a white-knuckled fist. "My hand...Kreia."

The droid scooted past them and extended its interface arm, jacking into the port below the door's control panel. It opened. Beyond, a battered freighter weighted hunkered on its landing legs, ramp extended like a gaping mouth.

Meetra pulled away from him, straightening. She unclenched her hand with an obvious effort of will, leaving bloody crescents in her palm. She looked back, and then she stalked across the deck, up the boarding ramp, and into the ship.

"Onward and upward, I guess," Atton said to the droid.

It made a quiet, doubtful sound.

* * *

The ship looked like a smuggler, judging by the amount of illegal technology hidden under its unassuming hull. High-powered turrets, fuel-injected engines, redundant shields... Kreia appeared in the cockpit as Atton was running through the preflight checks. Her right sleeve was empty and she walked with the dragging limp of someone who had pushed herself far beyond her capabilities.

"Go," she said, her voice pained. "I have delayed him only for a short while. Soon the _Harbinger_'s guns will be turned against us."

The exile looked at the older woman, but she said nothing.

Atton engaged the ship's repulsors. "I've got a bad feeling about this," he said, more to himself than to either of the women.

The _Ebon Hawk _answered him with dreamlike swiftness. She had more power than any freighter had a right to. More reasons to thank the smugglers who had refitted her, whoever they were. In an instant they were clear of the docking bay, racing past the _Harbinger _as the great warship came slowly about. Turbolaser blasts raked the darkness, stabbing between the drifting asteroids with surgical precision. One kiss and the _Ebon Hawk, _the name the little brass plate by the pilot's seat bore, would be dust and vapor. Atton flew her hard, diving and dodging, firing her maneuvering thrusters wildly. Inertia pressed him back into the sweat-stained padding of the seat as he wrestled for more speed, for more distance between the _Hawk _and the _Harbinger._

"Fire on the asteroids," Meetra said suddenly.

"Are you kidding?" he shouted. "We'll take out the station; there could be survivors! Not to mention this is where half the Outer Rim's fuel-"

Her hand closed like a vise on his shoulder. "Do it."

He tasked the turret quickly, striking keys with shaking fingers. Light lanced through the dark of space to rake furrows in the side of an asteroid as they corkscrewed deftly around it. Its blasted surface cracked, streamers of superheated gas and fire emerging under tremendous pressure, and as they raced clear of the field the rock blew apart in a silent glory of red and gold. Others went up around it, a chain reaction that swept out through the field like a grass fire spreading in a high wind.

_Switch the face of the +1/-4 card..._

The _Harbinger _plowed through the flame and ruin, her hull cutting void, and Atton threw the hyperspace lever. The stars stretched into lines of light.


	2. The Sleeping Wolf

Interlude One: The Sleeping Wolf

_As my feet walk from the ashes of Katarr I shall not fear, for in fear lies death._

There was a sound, and that sound was emptiness.

Visas Marr put a hand to her heart, her mantra forgotten. She drew a shuddering breath as the echoes of the empty sound faded slowly into a deeper silence. _What are you? _She wanted to reach out, to recapture that sound, that feeling. She felt ash against her face, the lash of hot wind.

And then it was gone, and she heard her master calling.

* * *

Her soft leather boots made no sound on the command deck's corroded plating. The filtered air was cold, touched by the void, and the low drone of her master's slaves plucked and hummed at the edges of her awareness as they swarmed around their stations in the crew pits to either side of the deck. Through the Force, through what he had left to her of her vision, she saw her master standing like a beacon of pure nothingness amidst the black. Darker and deeper, roiling with hunger.

"I felt it, too, my lord," she said. "A disturbance in the Force."

His words caught at her, pulled at her perceptions. There was sound, a glottal rasp like a drowned man coughing up water, but it carried no meaning in itself. His true words were in her mind, images that swelled and changed, burst and flared. He spoke the language of the Force.

She saw a world that was a grave and a woman that was a world, a burial ground, skin bristling with unmarked tombs. She saw burning blades in the dark, a hand cupped around a single point of light, an empty robe from which serpents crawled, thick and black, coils writhing. She saw a dead planet blooming with arms that groped and trembled.

She saw a woman whose face was void.

**Exile.**

"It was like a sound. Soft, but as I listened I found that I could hear it even over the background noise of the universe."

His presence expanded, tendrils lashing. She saw a mouth gnashing, teeth discolored, blood running down a chin. She saw a table set for many, the seats empty.

**Hunger.**

"My lord," she said. It was a struggle to speak in his presence, a struggle to lift her face to meet his ineffable gaze. She longed to lie down on her side, to curl in small upon herself and weep. "Do you believe she is a threat?"

He reached out through the Force to bind her throat with his will. She saw it happen. Visas wheezed as her feet left the deck, as her toes scuffed against it, kicking. "You...are the darkness in which all life...dies, my lord."

He shook her once, like a vrelt shaking prey, and dropped her. She fell to her knees and prostrated herself. "Life exists to...to feed your power, my lord." She swallowed past the lump in her raw throat. "I will follow the disturbance to its source and snuff it out. I will kill her. My life...my life is yours."

His voice washed over her again. She saw a dragon rising from still water, jaws agape. She saw a world afire, a woman robed in snow, a flight of some wild avians that burst from long grass near a sleeping giant. A dead sun shed its burning skin and showed the rot nestling deep within its heart.

**All.**

His hands, his real hands, lifted her. She felt the cold weight of his mask against her brow, smelled the rot and mildew of his robes. His touch was frigid, death to all that lived. He released her, drifted away to resume his contemplation of the void.

She bowed, swaying slightly with exhaustion. "I beg you," she said, her own words ringing distant in her ears, "let me die."

He said nothing.


	3. Through a Crack in the Door

Chapter Two: Through A Crack in the Door

They were arrested at the docks on Telos's Citadel Station. TSF officers cuffed and disarmed them, fitted the droid with a restraining bolt, and impounded the ship in the space of fifteen minutes. The exile bore it without complaint, nodding at everything the gruff, weathered commander barked. They spent the night sitting in cramped force cages in the TSF's dingy headquarters.

"Wherever I go, I wind up in a cell," Atton said to himself as the last of their jailers stepped out of the detention center, security doors shushing closed behind her. He settled down cross-legged, leaning back against the disconcerting slipperiness of the cell's force field.

"Quiet," the old woman snapped from the cell to his left. "My wound pains me, and I've no desire to listen to your petty complaints."

"Sorry, prime minister," Atton said, too tired to argue. "I'll see your breakfast is ready at dawn with the morning briefing."

"Fool." She closed her eyes and set her wrists on her knees, one open palm, one stump.

In her own cell the exile sat with one leg stretched out ahead of her, the other drawn up against her chest. Her eyes were slitted. She had shaved her long, snarled hair to black stubble on the brief trip between Peragus and Telos.

Atton settled back, still counting cards.

"So she was the one who gave the order at Malachor?" Atton lay back on his bed, savoring the chance to stretch out.

_...switch the face of the +1/-1 card..._

* * *

They had been moved to a room in a bare-bones housing development in the station's east annex. The Peragus facility's records, the lieutenant informed them, showed the _Harbinger_'s docking signature and confirmed turbolaser discharge in the system. There would still be an inquiry, but nobody was going to slam them up against a wall and do them for cutting the Outer Rim off from its biggest fuel source. Meetra was still at the station, something about paperwork for the _Ebon Hawk._

"Leave me be." The old woman stood by the window, the stump of her hand cradled against her chest. "I have not the time to indulge your infantile curiosity."

"I just thought she'd be tougher. Big Jedi war hero like that..."

"Strip the Force from even the greatest of the Jedi, and what remains?" She pressed her hand against the grass. Blue veins stood out between her tendons. "A child. A woman. Less capable even than one such as you, in some ways. You have developed skills necessary for survival while they have learned only to rely, to depend, on that which they understand only poorly." She scowled for a moment, her face shadowed by her cowl. "Come, we do her a disservice by discussing her while she is not present to represent herself. I must meditate on our course of action here."

"There is no 'we,'" Atton said. "As soon as we're out of this dump, I'm gone."

She smiled, infuriating, smug, and turned back to her contemplation of the city.

Citadel Station stretched away outside the window like a city built on a broken fragment of eggshell, all sheltering the ruined planet below. The station oversaw and supported the planet-wide restoration project, an Ithorian-backed environmental boondoggle trying to make Telos bloom again. The Sith had scorched it raw near the end of the war. Now its refugees clung to life in a floating slum. Atton had seen them on the walk back from the station, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed.

_...the total is zero-seven, switch..._

Dead things should stay dead.

That night he dreamed. He dreamed of a room with peeling wallpaper, a room in a tower block in a slum on some backwater planet whose name he no longer remembered. There was a table by the blacked out window, greasy Pazaak cards laid out for a game of solitaire. There was a bed, the mattress mildewed and stinking of blood.

_I love you._

He woke to the sound of hushed voices conversing. Meetra had returned. She and the old woman were speaking together by the window, well away from him. Only the hard points of the station's lights illuminated the room.

"That you can hear the Force at all after so much time has passed is something of a miracle," said Kreia. "You will need guidance if you are to find your path."

Meetra shrugged. Her arms were folded. "I am no Jedi."

"No," Kreia said, "but perhaps that is for the best."

"And you," Her face emerged from shadow, her sharp profile lit by the city's lights. "What are you, Kreia? How did you find me aboard the _Harbinger_?"

The old woman was silent for a long time. "I felt your presence from beyond the edge of the galaxy," she said at last. "When you returned, I sensed that it was time for our paths to cross."

"Nobody feels my presence. Not since Malachor."

A shuttle rumbled by their window, traversing the canyons between the station's towers. Light bathed the room for a handful of moments.

"Others have not walked where I have."

"Are you a Jedi." A freighted pause. "A Sith?"

Anger edged into Kreia's tone. "Is that all your world contains? Perhaps I once believed in the Code of the Jedi. Perhaps there was a time I felt the Dark Side's call, held the galaxy by its throat, and taught the worst tyrants of our time what they knew of evil. Perhaps for every good act that I undertook, I brought equal harm upon the galaxy.

"What would it matter? There is small comfort in such knowledge, and it is not who I am now."

The exile looked out at the void, at the planet beyond the station's edge. "I am no Padawan any longer, but...I need a teacher."

"Then listen when I speak, and heed my words." Kreia raised her hood, pulling the roughspun cloth of her robe forward one-handed. "Not for nothing did you hear my voice when you hung between life and death in that tank. Not for nothing did you feel my pain when that beast cut my hand from my wrist. We are bound together, you and I, for good or ill."

The exile said nothing. She looked out into the night.

It was a long time before Atton found sleep again.

* * *

Atton picked his teeth, leaning against a bulkhead while the guard stammered and hemmed.

"Stolen," Meetra said flatly.

"Yes, ma'am," the TSF officer replied. He was a young man, fresh-faced and red with embarrassment. He tapped at his console screen, scrolling through flight manifests and docking bay records for the twentieth time. "I'm sorry, but we've no idea where your ship has gone. It was boarded by someone with the launch codes, no holo record of it, and flown out-"  
"I can guess the rest," she said. Her right hand made a fist. "Thank you for your time."

"Telos drew us to it for a reason," Kreia said as the three of them walked together out of the station and slipped into the crowds traversing the entertainment module, "but we are running out of time. The Sith tried to kill you once; they will do so again, and soon. We cannot remain."

_...double the -2 card, totals are sixteen-sixteen, switch the face of..._

They passed a cantina window where Twi'Lek dancers moved with dreamlike slowness amid coils of smoke, the hands of a dozen different races reaching toward them from the shadows around their stage. Fistfuls of credits. Drinks slopping over brims. Meetra paused a moment, watching.

"She's right." Atton scanned the ground while they walked. The entertainment module was hard territory, for Citadel. Plenty of bounty hunters and out-of-work spacers who'd be thrilled to cash in on a runaway Jedi. "This place isn't safe."

The Ithorian came out of the alleyway a bare moment later, grabbing for Meetra's sleeve and honking excitedly in its guttural language. Atton had its back against the duracrete wall of the cantina, his arm across its massive throat and his blaster at its breast before he could even register what he was doing. A pulse beat hard at his temples. His mouth was dry. "Touch her again," he said through gritted teeth. "See what happens."

The Ithorian raised its spatulate hands in a gesture of surrender and stammered something in heavily accented Basic.

"You are drawing attention," Kreia said. Her voice was ice.

"Enough," said Meetra. Her hand closed on Atton's wrist.

He holstered his blaster and stepped away. Cold sweat trickled down his neck. Passers by were watching, muttering to one another. Sooner or later someone would go to the TSF.

"Speak," Meetra said to the Ithorian. She interposed herself between it and Atton.

It ducked its head, the mouths on the sides of its neck opening and closing nervously. "An apology for the roughness of my conduct," it rumbled, its eyes flickering from Atton back to Meetra. "I feared I might be apprehended before I could reach you. I am Moza, emissary of the Ithorian enclave. My leader, Chodo Habat, begs a moment of the honored Jedi's time. Ze wishes-"

"The Czerka Corporation and your herd are in conflict over the planetary restoration project." Kreia folded her arms. "You want her help in wresting control of the program back from their grasping hands. Why? Are you afraid of what will have to be done to secure such a prize?"

Meetra gave Kreia a sharp look.

The Ithorian blinked, dumbfounded. "I-I..."

"I can deliver what your herd's leader wants," Meetra said. "What do I get?"

"W-we have little to our names," Moza stammered. "Chodo has felt your pain through the Force and offers to heal you as best ze can."

"I need a shuttle to the surface." Lights from the holo displays inside the cantina danced across the hard planes of her face. "Give me that, and you get what you want."

"Chodo-"

"Give me what I want," she said. She said it quietly, gently. Her fingers brushed Moza's. "I will solve your problem."

Her eyes seemed to open up like holes in a shield array, and there was an emptiness behind them, an absence of pressure. It drew Atton in.

_...switch your face, the total is a pair of names, kill everyone who could leave a trail..._

He blinked. Moza was nodding. Meetra smiled at it and bowed, hands clasped behind her back. She straightened and turned on her heel. Her long stride carried her past Atton in a heartbeat; he jogged to catch up and fell in beside Kreia as they slipped back into the crowd, leaving a frightened Moza wringing its hands in their wake.

He shook his head. Did he have a headache? The air felt thick. "How did you know what it wanted?" he asked the old woman.

She sneered at him as they passed beneath one of the corporation's moving advertisements, holographic men and women smiling in a field of golden wheat.

"Open your eyes, fool. The truth is all around you."

Behind them, the dancers turned and swayed amidst the smoke, behind the glass.

* * *

Finding Czerka's headquarters on the station was simple, a matter of consulting a visitor's map. They stood together in the plaza outside the office's dull facade, recorded nature sounds playing tinnily as an artificial breeze stirred the foliage in the ornamental garden.

Everything in the plaza lay under fluorescents and cheap tile. Citadel wasn't affluent enough to warrant a holographic sky display, so the illusion of tranquility and openness in the square only made the place feel more disingenuous. It suited Atton. He knew how to deal with hollow people, how to spot what they wanted, what they were hiding. He was one of them, after all, in his battered rancor-leather jacket and his borrowed face.

_...the +5 card, pure Pazaak, switch..._

"I keep thinking your plans are going to make more sense the second time I hear them," he said. "So why does it still sound like you want to march in there and break Jana Lorso's teeth?"

"I don't intend to waste time with small talk," Meetra said, adjusting her vibroblade in its scabbard. She'd gone to a tailor's and shed her miner's rags for thick leggings, a red robe belted with a heavy sash, and a blue kaftan as fine as anything on Citadel. "She'll see things our way."

Kreia, watching the crowds of workers that circulated like migrating avians between the office and the various shops surrounding the plaza, frowned. "Be mindful of your surroundings. Plucking the wrong stand in Czerka's web could make us powerful foes indeed, and we can ill afford more of those at present. I sense that this Jana Lorso has friends in lofty places."

"I've already made our appointment," said Meetra. She spat in her left palm and rubbed her hands together briskly. "Surprising what greedy people will agree to when you tell them you're a Jedi."

"Meetra Surik." Lorso was a statuesque woman with royal blue Miralian hierarchy tattoos at her temples and dark hair held back in a severe bun. She rose from her seat in the decorous cavern of her office. Her desk was an ocean of polished red boma wood. Spotless. Empty. "I wondered-"

"Cede your contract to Chodo Habat," Meetra said. She glanced at Lorso's secretary, then back at the door they'd come through. "Get off of Telos. Don't come back."

"I admire your directness," Lorso said, smirking. "But I think-"

She was still smirking when Meetra took her head off. The exile swung herself over the desk in a fluid rush, skirts flying, one leg extended like a dancer's. Flash of a vibroblade, spray of blood. Lorso's body toppled from her chair as the exile slipped neatly back onto the carpet on the desk's far side. The dead woman's head rocked gently on the polished surface, its lips parted in surprise.

The Czerka executive's aide screamed, clapping her hands to her mouth, and scrambled from her chair. Security guards came barreling through the office doors and Atton turned to meet them.

_...the face of the +1/-3 card, totals are six and sixteen..._

The first guard died with a hole burned through her face, and the hand she'd thrown up to protect it. The second threw himself back toward the door, but Kreia gestured and he stumbled, slamming hard into the frame. Atton shot him twice in the back, flipped him with the toe of his boot, and shot him again in the throat. They locked eyes, the man gagging on blood as smoke wafted from his ruined neck. Atton keyed the door's emergency lock and stepped away. The pounding at his temples was back, and it was worsening.

"The archives are there," Meetra said, pointing to one of Lorso's bookshelves as she deactivated her vibroblade and cleaned it on the back of the dead woman's robe. "There's a fake panel behind the shelf. Get in and dump the records onto your datapad; a woman like that has to have enough dirt in her books to bury her branch in TSF inquiries for the next forty years."

"It'd be easier if we had that droid," Atton said as fists began to pound against the office door. He felt shaky, though he found the false ledger easily among Lorso's books. The shelf slid aside on oiled runners to reveal a dim room full of server towers, the whirring plinth of a mainframe terminal looming among the cables and readouts.

He felt her at his elbow as he stepped into the room. "You're worried that you lost control."

"It was..." _Why am I telling you this? _"It was like something just...snapped. I could have stunned them. Could have..."

"Listen to me," she said. "Listen to the sound of my voice. You made the right decision. We didn't have time to talk our way through this."

Kreia, standing in Lorso's office, made a disgusted noise. "Pour whatever poison you wish in that fool's ear," she snapped, "but do not think to sway me with your notions of necessity. You took the brute's path without thought and you will reap nothing but misery for your lack of vision."

"Noted," Meetra said, turning away from Atton as he stepped into the shadow of the mainframe terminal. "I'll think on it."

"See that you do."

Atton slotted his datapad into the tower, then paused. The pounding at the door had been joined by the high-pitched whine of a plasma cutter.

"Hey," he called back. "How are we getting out of here, again?"

* * *

They came out into the compound through the circulation vents. They smelled of disinfectant and stagnant water. Atton's ears rang with the _whump-whump-whump _of the station's fans, a sound that rang through every inch of the labyrinth they'd traversed, and he was bitterly cold. The Ithorian compound, by contrast, was humid and stank of fresh manure and stale tabac. The members of the herd ignored them studiously, going about their business among the hanging plants, the burbling fountains.

"Next time, I make the plan," Atton said. He rubbed his half-numb hands together. "We almost froze to death out there, and if they'd caught us on the station's sensors they could have opened up an airlock and flushed us into space."

"But they didn't," Meetra said. She flashed a grin over her shoulder and swaggered onward. Kreia looked unimpressed, but if she had thoughts she kept them to herself for a change.

Atton shook his head ruefully. _...draw and play the +3 card, total is twenty-two, bust, play the +1/-1 card, totals..._

They found Moza talking to a pair of Ithorians in heavy coveralls. It turned at their approach. "Ah," it said, waving the others away. "You've returned. Chodo will see you now."

Chodo Habat was old for an Ithorian, or at least ze looked it. Zir arms were ropy and thin, zir skin hanging loosely off their powerful frame. Ze sat cross-legged on a woven reed mat in a quiet solarium off of the enclave's main chamber. Natural light from Telos's sun warmed the spare, smoke-filled space. Atton was surprised at the relief he felt standing in that light, real light, after so many years on Peragus under its flickering fluorescents.

Meetra knelt on the mat opposite Chodo's. Atton hung back near the door, eyes keyed to the sound of boots on decking. The Ithorians didn't need to play them straight, and if the TSF showed up now they would be well and truly cocked. Kreia knelt a pace behind Meetra and to her left, an adviser's modest station.

"I sense much pain in you," said Chodo. Zir double voice resonated like a drum, spoken from two mouths, one of which held a long-stemmed pipe with some foul herb burning in its bowl. "I am saddened, also, that the aid you rendered us came to blood. How is that you turned so swiftly to the blade, honored Jedi, when your path-"

"My path is my own," the exile said. "I did what needed doing. When I brought Lorso a reasonable offer, she threatened to sell me to the Exchange."

_...pure Pazaak, draw, play the +3 card, a flower..._

The smoke from Chodo's pipe was getting to him. He blinked and passed a hand over his face. He needed a shave.

"Our shuttle is at your disposal, and one of our technicians has agreed to meet you on the surface," Chodo said. "He believes he may be able to track your ship. Moza also spoke to you of what I can offer. I am a priest of my people, an adept of the Force, and I have sensed your wound, exile."

"I don't want your healing," said Meetra. She stood. "It's a kind offer, Chodo, but save your art for Telos. She needs you. I do not."

* * *

The shuttle descended, breaking thrusters sending ripples through the grain. Bao-Dur hated watching ships land. It reminded him of Malachor, of the plumes of noxious green gas that had risen through the ruined atmosphere, of the warships pulled down into the roiling wreck of that fractured planet. He had opened Malachor's jaws, and its broken teeth had snapped shut on the Mandalorians and the Jedi both. Even out here in the restoration zone, a place of healing, he could hear the screams.

The ugly Ithorian ship landed with a thrum of repulsors that echoed out to the walls of the wide, shallow canyon. Bao-Dur's remote signaled caution and he felt a sudden shiver, a premonition that traveled from his toes to the horns that grew like a crown from his scalp. Death. The remote whizzed around him in a tight circle as in the distance a pack of cannoks set up their burbling cries.

She came down the landing ramp. Her hair was shaved short, her scars concealed beneath a red robe and a loose kaftan, but it was her. He hadn't believed it when they'd told him. There were two others with her, a man in a rancor-leather jacket who took pains to look at ease and an old woman in worn brown robes, her milk-white eyes half-hidden by her cowl.

"General," he said, shaking off the last remnants of his feeling of ill omen and bowing stiffly from the waist. "I didn't expect to see you here."

"I'm missing a ship," she said. "Someone told me you could find it."

Bao-Dur gestured with his left arm, the one he'd made himself. "If she's on the planet, I can find her. If not, general, then I'm afraid there's not much I can do."

The man in the jacket strode closer. He stopped beside her. "You know him?"

"From the war," she said.

The stun grenade spun through the air and fell with a thump in the center of their little group. The old woman yelled, the stump of her right arm outflung, and then there was white light and a sound like glaciers calving, and then darkness.

* * *

The handmaidens parted to let her pass, carefully blanked minds inscrutable behind identical faces. The doors slid open at her approach and she stepped into the darkness, her white robes hissing over the polished floors of the academy. A silence grew in the space between her and the occupant, a silence that reached back through the years and chilled her heart to ice. She waved the guards away.

"I thought you were dead."

The exile sat slumped in the corner of her cell. The stun grenade had singed the sleeves of her kaftan and left her face smudged with soot. Her eyes were paler than Atris remembered.

"So did I, for a time."

"Did you come thinking to kill me?" She paced to the bench set opposite her prisoner and sank onto it with grace, sweeping the skirts of her robe to the left. "Does your hatred of the Jedi run so deep that you would cut the Order's throat for good and all?"

"Believe what you want of me," Surik said. "The truth has never been a problem for you, but I had no inkling you were even present. Where are we, precisely? Under one of the poles?"

Atris said nothing. Even now, this woman vexed her, reached past her defenses without care. Captured, disarmed, lying chained in the dark, she still commanded the room.

"I thought so." The exile smiled that same infuriating smile. It faded, though. "What have you done with the others? My friends?"

Atris scoffed. "As though one such as you has friends. You bring a trained Echani warrior, the murderer of Malachor, and one of the Order's cast-offs to my doorstep-"

"I am the murderer of Malachor. A lightsaber is nothing without an arm to wield it." The pale eyes narrowed in the gloom. "What have you done with the others? Where is my ship?"

"Nothing?" Atris produced the lightsaber from her sleeve with a flick of her wrist. It slapped home in her palm as though made for it, its elegant electrum-plated haft worn by time and long use. "I have kept it all these years, a constant reminder of your betrayal, a reminder of the day we sentenced you. Too lightly, I felt."

The blue blade blazed to life, throwing shadows on the walls, casting the exile in sharp relief.

"It's mine," said Surik.

"You have no right to this weapon." Atris deactivated the blade and returned the lightsaber to her sleeve, sorry somehow that she had shown it at all. "No right to call yourself a Jedi, you who have trafficked with the Sith."

"You're mistaken. The Sith are hunting me. They struck at Peragus-"

"_You _struck at Peragus." She forced herself to remain calm, to keep her face impassive. "I recognized your handiwork."

"I'm not the first person to destroy a planet, and I won't be the last." There was a ring of prophecy to that. "It was a Sith Lord. Sion. He commandeered the warship _Harbinger _and tore the asteroid field apart in pursuit of my ship, the whereabouts of which we still haven't addressed."

"Hunting you?" She rose from her seat, furious at the denial in the other woman's expression, at finding herself stymied again by the exile's words. "Why? Who is this Sion?"

"You're not going to kill me." Her certainty was absolute. It rang like iron. "And we both know you won't leave me here, so why don't you give me back my ship, free my friends, and stand aside before something happens that at least one of us will regret."

"I have tracked the movements of the Sith. I have felt the emptiness they carry with them, and I sense it on you now." She did. The exile was a dead spot, empty of the Force but for a few faint stirrings. The twinges of a phantom limb. And yet...she was not of the Sith. There was no madness in her, no taint of the Dark Side. Atris folded her sleeves. "Why have you returned from your wanderings? Where were you when Revan turned on us and split the Republic in half?"

"Would you have wanted me back?" The woman's chains clinked as she shifted, stretching one leg out ahead of her. "How do you know I would not have returned to my master's service?"

"You came to us for judgment." Atris straightened, lifting her chin. "Revan did not."

"I need to find the others, Atris."

"Why? So you can kill them?"

"So I can warn them." She turned her hands, palms upward in a gesture of peace and supplication. "The Sith _are _hunting Jedi. They _have _returned. On Peragus I saw them. Darth Sion, a ruined man held together by hatred, a legion of Sith Assassins at his command... I have the _Harbinger_'s crew logs on the _Ebon Hawk's _computers. See for yourself."

"Logs can be faked," Atris said, but in her bones she knew that they were not. The killings she had tracked, the disappearances she'd investigated...

"They can be," said the exile, "but I am not a liar. You know that, at least."

"Where have you been, all of these years?"

"The Unknown Regions." Something broken crept into her voice, some old pain. "I was...I was looking."

Atris moved to the doors. They slid soundlessly open again. Beyond them, the training room resounded to the shouts of the handmaidens sparring. Bodies in white flew and twisted, trading blows. "You'll leave," Atris said. She lingered in the doorway, one hand gripping durasteel, not daring to look back. "Take your ship. Take your...friends, I have not harmed them, and fly far from here, but you will do so under my guard. One of my handmaidens will accompany you. She will keep watch, and she will report to me what you learn in your travels."

The exile nodded, then looked away.

Atris almost reached for her, almost seized her jaw to make her look. But no. She drew her hand back. The old silence yawned between them. It had been untouched by all their words.


End file.
